Understanding Depth of Field and Its Creative Uses

Depth of field is one tool you should be using to make your images more interesting and powerful.
Depth of field is an easy concept to understand and use. There is no reason why you can’t start using it today. Chances are you have already started using depth of field photography, you just don’t know it.

Understanding Depth of Field

What is depth of field is simple. It’s how much of your scene is in focus. That’s it.
And here’s a more complicated definition. Depth of Field is the distance between the closest objects in focus and the farthest point of focus.
Consider this. You are out photographing a beautiful landscape. And you want to be able to see the whole scene for what it is.
Here, you would use a deep depth of field, as it will keep your foreground and background in focus.

How aperture affects depth of field

Now, you are walking around a city, trying to capture portraits of people. You want to cut out the distracting background, so you use a shallow depth of field in your photography.
Here, your foreground is in focus but the background is not.
Your aperture of f/stop is what indicates your depth of field. If you don’t know about aperture, then you need to read this post first.
The wider the aperture, the shallower the depth of field and vice versa. The diagram below explains this.
The smaller the depth of field, the smaller the area of focus will be. This focal area can be anywhere in your image.
You can use it to put the background, the middle ground or the foreground in focus. The choice is yours.
A small aperture such as f/1.2 while photographing a face can put the eyes in focus, but keep the nose and ears blurry.
Using the same f/stop, you can focus on the nose, which will blur the eyes.
Your Depth of Field also changes with your distance while photographing a subject.
Moving farther away from a subject will make your depth of field photography wider. Moving closer will make it shallower.
The background and the foreground effectively become closer. This is when compared to the distance between you and the subject.

Shallow Depth of Field

A shallow depth of field comes from using a large aperture. Anything between f/1.4 and f/4 will give you a shallow depth of field.
This is a great way to separate your foreground from its background.
The background might be uninteresting, distracting attention from your subject.
You can even use depth of field in your photography to single out a point of interest in an otherwise busy scene.

Medium Depth of Field

With an aperture of f/5.6, you create images of a medium depth of field.

Here, you can make out the detail of the whole body as well as some of the background.

In situations like this where there is depth to the photo, it’s important to consider the aperture before taking the photo.

You’ll want to keep as much of the subject in focus as possible.

Deep Depth of Field

You can create a wide depth of field using a small aperture. Anything between f/8 and f/22 would be giving you a wide DoF.
This is how you would capture a scene where both the foreground and background are interesting.
Perfect for landscapes and city scenes.

What Happens When You Change Your Aperture

Remember the exposure triangle? If you don’t, here is a quick recap.
You enter a scene and set your camera to capture a perfect exposure. Then you need to reevaluate your settings if you decide to change your aperture.
Let’s say you are photographing at the settings ISO 100, f/16 and 1/125, and you decide you want a shallower depth of field.
You need to move your aperture from f/16 to f/2.8, which means you have added five stops of light.
You need to take this light out of your scene, otherwise, it will overexpose the image.
The ISO is at it’s darkest, so we only have the shutter speed to play with. We need to take those five stops out, which we do by changing the shutter speed to 1/4000.

When to Use Depth of Field

Consider the following two photographs. The first capture was with a wide depth of field using a wide aperture, such as f/16. As you can see everything is in focus.
Both the foreground and the background have the same amount of focus, and thus, attention.
The photographer wants to show you the entirety of the scene. It’s all interesting.
The mountain in the background gives a great focal point. And the foreground gives you a leading line with that crack.
The second image is very different. Here the photographer used a shallow depth of field, using a shallow aperture such as f/1.8. Only the foreground is in focus.
This choice is down to the photographer, as they wanted to push the focus on the flowers in the foreground.
The background is still there, and it gives the scene a presence as you can still get a sense of where you took the image.
The blurry background doesn’t distract attention from the foreground.

How to Use Depth of Field for Creative Photos

Using a Wide and Shallow Depth of Field Together

One interesting way to show a scene is to find a way to use both wide and shallow depth of field photography together. This can be best done by using another photograph.
This has been a trend of late. Especially with photographers holding a historical image over the modern live version of a setting. Or consider the photograph below.
The photographer used their mobile to capture a wide depth of field.
Then they photographed using a shallow depth of field.

High-Quality Bokeh

Bokeh has been a trend on its own for the last few years. It means ‘blur’ in Japanese, and photographers use it to blur the background lights.
It does add an interesting background to an image, but be careful not to overuse it.
The background can become more interesting than the foreground. This image uses a very shallow depth of field, f/1.8.

Placing the Focus on the Middle Ground

Don’t focus on the foreground or the background. Focus somewhere between instead. Your focal area should be where you want to take the viewer’s attention to.
So your focus should be on that point, no matter where it is.
As you can tell, this image is more interesting because of the shallow depth of field. It wouldn’t be as interesting if the whole scene was in focus.
Also, the photographer used movement to pinpoint the police officer. Not just a shallow aperture.

Background as a Focal Point

There are images that I love, and that is because of an unconventional focal point. Here, most photographers would have focused on the camera in the foreground, and left the mountains blurry.
This photographer chose the opposite, and it broke my initial focus. You can use this technique to your advantage.
Turn that everyday landscape into something way more interesting.
Before you go, check out this cool video on using depth of field as a creative tool.

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About the Author

Craig is a photographer currently based in Budapest. His favourite photographic areas are street and documentary photography. Show him a darkroom and he'll be happy there for days. As long as there are music and snacks. Find him at craighullphotography.co.uk and Instagram/craighullphoto